Well, we do get some detail on how Durotan got exiled from the Horde and returned (apparently getting offed in the process), which is sort of an ambiguous spot in lore. We also learn that half-orcs grow remarkably fast. xD
Not much otherwise unless you happen to run a Warcraft I era campaign (which would have severely restricted class and race choices). No Paladins/Warlocks (until later in the campaign itself, of course), no Necromancers/demon hunters, high elves/night elves/dwarves/trolls/Tauren/Forsaken/gnomes/Draenei, etc.
I do see the movie being inspiring to roleplayers and becoming useful in getting people hyped up for tabletop play, however. Our hobby always needs some new blood.

Arrius Nideal wrote:Well, we do get some detail on how Durotan got exiled from the Horde and returned (apparently getting offed in the process), which is sort of an ambiguous spot in lore. We also learn that half-orcs grow remarkably fast. xD

I guess that extra detail will go up on Wowpedia, after the movie comes out.

Arrius Nideal wrote:Not much otherwise unless you happen to run a Warcraft I era campaign (which would have severely restricted class and race choices). No Paladins/Warlocks (until later in the campaign itself, of course), no Necromancers/demon hunters, high elves/night elves/dwarves/trolls/Tauren/Forsaken/gnomes/Draenei, etc.

It might be useful to work out when each of these playable options becomes available in the Warcraft timeline, at some point.

Arrius Nideal wrote:I do see the movie being inspiring to roleplayers and becoming useful in getting people hyped up for tabletop play, however. Our hobby always needs some new blood.

I think you are right there.

Any big fantasy film is going to make some RPG fans think about roleplaying in that world.

If we are really lucky, Blizzard will put out a roleplaying game on the back of this movie...

...another thing that might happen (that could still be of some use to tabletop players) is some sort of miniatures-based wargame, based on the movie.

One of the things that might be helpful (from what I've seen in the featurettes) is that they've developed some locations more than they are in the game, or invented new locations. For instance: while they have used the Lion's Pride Inn pretty much as designed, there's no real Stormwind armory. The movie features one, though, and that could be mapped back out. Also, I think the Karazhan library is different than the one in the game (plus, we get to see Karazhan when Medivh lived there, rather than after it has fallen into ruin.)

(The book Warcraft: Behind the Dark Portal looks like the concept art book for the movie. I haven't seen it, so I don't know how much of that detail made it in.)

A second thing that might be helpful is the more realistic visuals. It's been clear for some time that the MMO version of the towns is vastly simplified down from the RPG book version of the towns. The movie visuals for Stormwind probably give a more accurate scope of the city and fortress than the MMO does.

Bonetti wrote:One of the things that might be helpful (from what I've seen in the featurettes) is that they've developed some locations more than they are in the game, or invented new locations. For instance: while they have used the Lion's Pride Inn pretty much as designed, there's no real Stormwind armory. The movie features one, though, and that could be mapped back out. Also, I think the Karazhan library is different than the one in the game (plus, we get to see Karazhan when Medivh lived there, rather than after it has fallen into ruin.)

I have to say that, from a tabletop gaming point-of-view, this is one of the things that I have really been looking forward to.

They did actually have subtitles on the external shots a couple of the locations "Iron Forge" and "Stormwind", but then they didn't keep doing that, when they went back. (And they didn't have subtitles showing the name of every building. So it came down to recognising locations from the MMO...or not recognising them. )

However, the Wowpedia article, does have a list of YouTube videos, that might be useful for this discussion:

Bonetti wrote:(The book Warcraft: Behind the Dark Portal looks like the concept art book for the movie. I haven't seen it, so I don't know how much of that detail made it in.)

They seem to have changed the name of that book. See the links at the top post for the Wowpedia article about the book.

Bonetti wrote:A second thing that might be helpful is the more realistic visuals. It's been clear for some time that the MMO version of the towns is vastly simplified down from the RPG book version of the towns. The movie visuals for Stormwind probably give a more accurate scope of the city and fortress than the MMO does.

It certainly feels more "real" than the MMO version. I always felt that was a bit of a dead-end, where this city seems to actually occupy a stretch of the coast and looks like people could travel north south and east from the city.

I'm not familiar with WoW Online, and only ever played one of the older Warcraft games once or twice. Think it was a C&C style of play. Is the movie based directly on any of the games, or is it "inspired by"?

That pic isn't that flash.. the city walls on the right look very fake. I wonder where the original scenery is?

Inspired by. It have some retcons, that reflects some changes in lore made in WoW. The movie ins't bad, but if you're not a fan of the game, is a meh movie. As a fan of the game, you can like or dislike, but isn't bad. And, as we have been warned that the movie is an "alternate universe" to the game, there is no point in being upset about the changes in lore.

Watched it a week ago. I agree with Zeromaru; it is meh if you know the lore.
Medivh doesn't look like Medivh, fel magic is semi-sentient, and the CGI fluctuate between excellent (orcs) and meh (gryphons).
This AU blows. XD

Finally got around to watching the movie. I thought it was okay. It is worth noting that I have never played World of Warcraft. The main reason for this being that I do not like online games. I do have some experience with the original Warcraft game, but I cannot claim to be familiar with any of the lore at all. I find it interesting that fans of WoW are so critical, since I would have thought it was mostly made for the fans. To me many of the references were confusing. Overall, the world did not seem too interesting, but I did like the bits about the Orc origin story. Also, overall the storylines involving Orc characters were the most interesting.

Oh, and by the way: armored knights running towards the enemy while firing flint lock pistols might work in the game, but looks really silly in a movie.

Morfie wrote:I'm not familiar with WoW Online, and only ever played one of the older Warcraft games once or twice. Think it was a C&C style of play. Is the movie based directly on any of the games, or is it "inspired by"?

It is based on the past (Warcraft) rather than the present (World of Warcraft). There were several Warcraft games before the online World of Warcraft was developed. The movie is the story of the orcs arriving on Azeroth from another world via a portal. That's all done and dusted before the MMO started up. The MMO has the Horde and the Alliance as two factions that are up against each other.

Morfie wrote:That pic isn't that flash.. the city walls on the right look very fake. I wonder where the original scenery is?

I'm not sure, but they did a fairly reasonable job of representing the "real" shape of Stormwind, while still rebooting it, so that they could expand it.

Here is what the city walls on the right look like from outside the city (in the MMO): File:Stormwindcitypicture.jpg. As you can see the MMO has Stormwind build occupying a fairly narrow valley that allows them to build a defensive wall that cuts off travel.

It's not possible to get a short of Stormwind from the same angle as in the movie (as flying mounts do not work in the original game areas - only in new areas designed to be compatible with flying mounts). But here is a map from the game: File:WorldMap-StormwindCity.jpg. Note that Stormwind Keep is the "end" of Stormwind in the MMO, but there is an entire city district behind it in the movie.

The island with the distinctive bridges over the canal is taken from Stormwind in the MMO (and is instantly recognisable to anyone who has played the game) but it's been rotated around and moved to the coast. In the game the horseshoe shape surrounds the Trade District.

Back when I played World of Warcraft, it was impossible to get to Stormwind Harbour or any other part of Stormwind facing the sea. That got added in a later patch. IIRC, they actually had people building the new area when they first introduced it and then got rid of the construction crew later on. (You can sort of get a story of World of Warcraft just from reading the patch releases. Some of them - not all of them - have some pretty cool names too.)

Big Mac wrote:It's not possible to get a short of Stormwind from the same angle as in the movie (as flying mounts do not work in the original game areas - only in new areas designed to be compatible with flying mounts).

One of the complaints about the expansion Cataclysm was that the high-level content was thin.

A big reason why it was so weak was because they revamped all of the original zones, rebuilding the original world to allow flight. Sure, there are invisible walls in a few places, and a ceiling, but you can use flying mounts over Stormwind and all the other cities[*]. You should be able to get something fairly close to that shot, although I don't have an active subscription to try it with.

The rebuild took a huge amount of effort, because they had done a lot of unlinked or incomplete geometry (e.g. distant spires / castles in Stormwind, some of the above ground areas at Undercity, etc.). If an in-game camera couldn't get into that position, it was often neglected.

[*] ...except for Silvermoon and Exodar. For technical reasons, the Burning Crusade starting areas are separate from the rest of the continent, and they have not been rebuilt. They're still limited to ground mounts, sadly.

Rewatched it last month. While certainly more impressive on the big screen, and particularly in 3D, I still find it to be a thoroughly solid fantasy flick, probably in my top 25 movies of all time and unquestionably in my top 50 (this is a "my favorites" list rather than "objectively best of all time", natch; I'm not putting, say, "2001: A Space Odyssey" in there, no matter how groundbreaking it was, since I literally fell asleep the first time I tried to watch it). It suffers badly from the tendency of all fantasy properties to be utterly deadpan serious; there are only three humor beats in the entire film, and two of them are played as character moments rather than as jokes (that is to say, the characters are joking in-dialogue, rather than the joke being "aimed" directly at the audience). While this is probably just as well in general (Hollywood's efforts at humor are inconsistent at the best of times, and comedy as a genre tends to age poorly*), and more specifically so for this particular movie (it's a genocidal war between grizzled humans and bloodthirsty humanoids; lightheartedness would sound a sour note if not handled very carefully), it still tends to mean that watching the movie is a less than enlivening experience in some ways. The pretty colors in scenery pans or uses of magic, the frenetic action scenes, and Ramin Djawadi's magnificent soundtrack all help keep it from being a completely unhappy view, but the film does drag more than a little during some of the talky bits, where character exposition is being accomplished by way of very serious conversations, in hushed tones, between drably-costumed and almost painfully ordinary-looking characters in poorly-lit rooms of castles or taverns. (It could have been a *lot* worse, and I don't want you to think I didn't like the movie; all I'm saying is that there was plenty of room to improve.)

* This is not an original observation of mine; it comes from Cracked.com, but I think they're right. This is not to say that things you found hilarious 20 years ago are not still funny today, but rather that what made the average audience member laugh just 5 or 10 years ago will probably barely make the average audience member today crack a knowing smile. Whatever a person's comedy tastes are, they tend to become "fixed" within a fairly narrow range of humor "generations"; the Cracked guys have theorized that this is due to the fact that every decade or so, new comedians are coming up which "digested" and innovated upon the humor of their youth, so if you like a comic that was hugely inspired by Jim Belushi, then Belushi himself probably doesn't really work for you, because your taste in humor has become accustomed to "Belushi version 2.0", and anything before that seems a bit stale by comparison.